(YouTube link)

Gertie Cleary of Elmsdale, Nova Scotia, saw a raven perched on her fence with porcupine quills stuck in its face. The overly-friendly juvenile raven had a run-in with a porcupine, then made a better choice to let the woman get close. Cleary, wisely wearing gloves, did what she had to do.

The bird, clearly in pain, waited for Cleary to get each one of the quills out. Cleary says she didn’t think twice about helping the animal in distress.

“It reminded me of a child with a splinter and when you pull a splinter out, they holler and screech and pull their hand away,” says Cleary.

Once the quills were out, Cleary carried the bird to her daughter’s house, where she fed him dog food and water.

She let the raven, named Wilfred by the Cleary family, outside the next day, and he hung around for a while before flying off. Let's just hope the bird learned his lesson about porcupines. Link  -via Arbroath

This Saturday, Zeon and I took a trip to the opening day at the San Diego County Fair. While we were there, we got to see a lot of cool things -especially cute farm animals, and we ate some seriously weird (but delicious foods). Here's how the day went down.

We arrived at the fair reasonably late, some time around 4, but given as how the fair is open until midnight that still left us plenty of time to explore. We immediately hit the first building to our left, which houses the flower displays and all of the hot tub salespeople you can imagine. That's when we got our first smell of something absolutely heavenly...grilled corn. We didn't have any since we grill our own corn whenever we barbecue, but man did it smell like heaven.

After we got over the distracting smell of grilled corn, we started checking out the flower displays, and while most were rather avant-garde like this one:

There were also quite a few that fell in line with this year's fair theme, "Game On."

Of course, my personal favorite was the only gaming-inspired flower creation.

After leaving the building, we entered one of the many food-filled areas and were immediately welcomed by a travelling incarnation of LA's famous Pink's Hot Dogs. 

Right beside Pink's was one of the truly magnificent eateries of the fair, the Bacon-A-Fair, which sells chocolate-covered bacon, bacon-flavored root beer, beer-battered bacon...

two-pound turkey legs wrapped in one pound of bacon...

and all kinds of bacon-y, delicious treats. Notice their sign warning that they offer no vegetarian, kosher, halal, salt-free, fat-free or taste-free foods.

Many authors make outlines of their novels to keep the story arc in place, make sure the important parts are not missed, and to keep up with each character. They each have their own style, as well. See some handwritten outlines from James Salter, J.K. Rowling, Sylvia Plath, William Faulkner, and more at Flavorwire. The chart shown is how Joseph Heller kept up with the characters and their plot lines in Catch-22. You can click the image twice at Flavorwire to bring up the large size, but you might need to put on your glasses to read it anyway. Link

Ink on original Michelin map of France

Growing up, I've always thought the continent of Africa looked like a sideway face, but Ed Fairburn takes that imagination to a whole new level. The Cardiff-based illustrator finds portraits of human faces hidden amongst the topographical features in various maps of the world.

View more over at Ed's official website | Facebook page | Interview with Yatzer - via Juxtapose

Lake Windermere in England

GeoGuessr is a game that uses Google Street View. You'll get an image, and you try to guess where in the world it is. I jumped in and scored 4470 right off, which must be awful, because I guessed very wrong. Then I figured out you can zoom and turn just like any Street View scene, and improved in my second game to 7002, which is still awful. It turns out that no matter how much you zoom into a sign, it will not "enhance" like in TV crime dramas. It also helps to zoom into the world map to make your guess, because even if you know the answer, you'll be scored on how close you mark the spot. I finally busted 10K on my third try. This could be addictive. Link -via the Presurfer

The artist Han Jan presents Rainbow Dash as Thor, Spike as the Hulk, Fluttershy as War Machine, Pinkie Pie as Iron Man, Applejack as Captain America, Rarity as Black Widow and Twilight Sparkle as Nick Fury. The last pairing is particularly apt because the black outfit and eye patch match Twilight Sparkle's appearance in the time travel episode "It's about Time."

Does Han Jan's style look familiar? We've previously featured his array of Gundam ponies.

Link